For less than $10 a year in registration fees, I consider this of the highest priority, even if you do not own a business. It is not important that you use the domain, but what is important is that you have the ability to control usage of the name. For example there are a few other people named ‘Kelvin Brown’, online. There are many more offline. However, here is the tricky part, even though they personally may not have a website, others are likely to mention their names.

For example, there was a college basketball player, that got into a little trouble, his name was, Kelvin Brown. He was mentioned online by several news organizations and bloggers. It just happened that people curious about that event started looking for him online, inevitably, they found www.KelvinBrown.com, which I controlled. And because I controlled it, I could edit it to let them know, that they found the wrong site.

http://KelvinBrown.com/helpdesk
http://BlackSearchOnline.com

But equally important is to have your link on highly relevant pages. A good link from a relevant page is just like getting a recommendation from a friend ( 3rd party). In some cases these links are better than search engine placements, because with a search engine you are competing against sometimes thousands or even 10s of millions for a top spot. Who knows if you will be found. And you are good enough or lucky enough to be found, you have to keep putting time in to stay at the top of those engines.

If you get links to other related sites instead, there is not fighting, there is little if any additional work required.

I can safely say that more than 50% are not.

What is it that needs to be done, but is not being done?

The simple things to help others, like me, promote you.

The absolute simplest thing you can do is use accurate
titles and descriptions on your web pages.

You see, I own a search engine. I go out looking for sites
to add. But I need speed, so many times I by-pass 50%
of the sites I visit, because you make me work to find out
what your site is about. I have to try to add a title and
description for your site, before I can add it to my directory.

So, unless your site looks really great, I skip it.
That means you loose free advertising. And I can tell you
that I am not the only one that will skip your site.

The same is true when you submit your site to my directory.
It is getting better, but at times, I delete half of the sites
submitted because the title is non- existent, or non-descriptive.

Again, this means you are loosing valuable advertising.
And if you took time to submit it, but did not include good
titles or descriptions then you have just wasted your time.

So do yourself a favor.
Add titles and descriptions to your sites.

kelvin brown
http://AfricanAmericanBusinessDirectory.com
http://kelvinbrown.com

I was on a teleseminar call this morning with Willie Crawford. He was giving advice on how to check your website in different browsers.

He said go to www.anybrowser.com. What the user heard over the phone, phonetically, was go to www. N E browser.com.

Of course that was not correct, but NE sounds like ANY.

So, when choosing domain name sound them out and write them out. You want to make sure if at all possible that the user gets the name right, the first time. They may not wait around to give you a second chance.

kelvin brown

Well his domain was only 8 characters long. So, I asked him, why.

He wants to send visitors to longer url inside his site: example:
www.kelvinbrown.com/this_is_a_really_long_domain_URL.html

There are 2 basics ways to shorten this to something like.
www.kelvinbrown.com/long

If u have access to FTP u can use a .htaccess file.
Or you can use a simple refresh command in the header of your html file.

Either way, I get to keep my branding.

Most people should not be using services that shorten your URL, and take away from your branding.

Kelvin